This monograph explores issues such as: What is the mind? How does it distinguish itself from the surrounding world? How does it interact with it? To what extent is our world knowable? Arguments for and against the main theories articulated over the centuries regarding these questions are presented.
Particular emphasis is placed on the analytical philosophical method of examination and the cognitive approach to cognition as computational information processing, creating representations, adaptation plans, and actions that reasonably serve biological and psychological purposes.
If "the sleep of reason breeds monsters," the awakening of the mind creates order from chaos. These findings are connected to the motivations that drove the author of this monograph. Even if logical thinking does not definitively resolve many metaphysical and epistemological problems, it usually contributes to cultivating, as a life stance, a sober rationalism opposed to dogmatic ideologies and to shallow and/or opportunistic emotionalism, both of which are equally harmful to individuals and societies.
Foreword by Nikos Dimou
Foreword by Ioannis Papakosta
Introduction
1. Existence and reality. Truth and knowledge
Introduction
The concept of existence
The properties of the true and the false
The dispute between realism and anti-realism
Knowledge
Experiences and knowledge
Skepticism
2. Intentional states and mental representations
Intentionality, representation relations, propositional attitudes
Intentionality and meaning
The intentional stance
What are concepts
The structure of concepts
Concepts as linguistic objects and as images
Intentional content (meaning). The internalism-externalism debate
Broad and narrow intentional content
Methods of determining narrow meaning
Intentional content and concepts
Mental representations
Mental images as representations
The representational and computational theory of mind
3. Physicalist and dualist theories on the relationship between mind and matter
Dualism and monism. Physical and non-physical objects.
Reductionism and theories of emergence
The necessary and the contingent
Physicalism
Logical behaviorism
Functionalism
The historical roots of philosophical dualism
Philosophical dualism in the Middle Ages and modern times
Contemporary forms of dualism
Arguments for dualism – The argument from self-purposiveness
The modal argument
The anti-reductionist argument
The argument of personal identity
The problem of phenomenalism
Recent views on the interaction between mind and brain
4. Consciousness and phenomenological properties
Consciousness
Neuroscience and consciousness
The explanatory gap
Theories of higher-order consciousness
Phenomenal properties – qualia
The exclusively subjective nature of experiences
Philosophical zombies
The absent qualia argument
The inverted color spectrum argument
The swampman thought experiment
The response to the inverted color spectrum arguments
The knowledge argument
Eliminativism and qualia
Phenomenalism
Neutral monism
5. Cognitive science
The cognitive approach
The language of thought
Formal logic
Propositional and categorical logic
Assessment of reasoning systems
Application of inference rules
Representation at the level of concepts
Analogies
Mental imagery
Connectionism
The mind as a dynamic-chaotic system
Cognitive neuroscience – The brain as a computational organ
Representational and computational capabilities of the brain
Mental information processing
Specialized functional subsystems
Simulators and emulators
6. So, what is cognition?
Glossary
Index
